Tests Show That Deadly New Flu Could Spread Among People 185
An anonymous reader writes in with another news story about how the bird flu may wipe us out. "A new bird flu that has killed 36 people in China can spread from ferret to ferret through the air. A laboratory test showing airborne transmission of the H7N9 avian influenza virus between the animals has raised fears that the virus is poised to become a human pandemic.
The H7N9 avian influenza virus emerged suddenly at the end of February and has infected 131 people. A few patients may have caught the virus from other infected people, but no evidence has emerged that H7N9 can readily transmit from human to human."
Re:More ridiculous sensationalism (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More ridiculous sensationalism (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, this is pretty serious. Most of the people who were infected became critically ill and the method of death was due to sepsis, respiratory distress, or organ failure. Contrast this with SARS where only the very young or very old became critically ill. This new virus also has twice the fatality rate of SARS and can be spread by animals we use for food.
Your snark is unwarranted. Just because the number is low right now doesn't mean that it is stable or controlled. And the research on ferrets was designed to determine if it was plausible to spread from human to human. If the virus can spread from ferrets in the air, it is entirely plausible that the same applies to humans.
Re:More ridiculous sensationalism (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly FUD. Think of it as a snowball that might turn into a avalanche.
A 25% kill rate is nothing to sneeze at.
Ferret are the best animal model we have – and there are open questions on how it was transmitted.
And, most importantly, there is the question on how this virus would change it if went wide.
A virus needs to balance out 2 factors from a evolutionary standpoint. First, the more copies of itself it turns out the better chance it while have to spread, while the more copies it turns out the more likely it will kill the host so no more copies will be turned out.
If this virus went wide, the more virulent versions would dominate, which means the death toll would be higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virulence#Evolution [wikipedia.org]
Remember to wash your hands and sneeze into your sleeve everybody! (I am not stocking up on antivirals yet.)
Re:More ridiculous sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stupid Title and then stupid article (Score:5, Informative)
I saw the title and said to myself, "No shit flu can spread from person to person."
Then they talk about "bird" flu and say it spreads from ferret to ferret. I've had a public school education, so maybe I missed the day where they told us ferrets were birds and not mammals.
The connection with ferrets is that ferrets and humans share the same "human influenza" virus and can pass it on to each other. So, that means that if ferrets can get this type of influenza and pass it on, there is a reasonable probability that humans can too. That doesn't mean this is an "OMG were all gonna die!!!" sort of thing, it just means that this particular test shows a reasonable probably that humans could spread the virus from each other, and points out that the test were done under ideal (ideal to the virus) conditions.
Frankly I don't think the title is overly sensationalistic, nor is the quoted part of the summary, but the part "how the bird flu may wipe us out" is sensationalistic, inaccurate, and the editor who put it in there should be fired or sent over to Fox News.
Re:More ridiculous sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)
What the GP said is generally true.
Agents (virus or bacteria) that kill 100 percent of those it infects do not last long, and generally do not spread far.
It is a counter productive evolutionary path for infective agents.
Therefore, the tendency is to become less deadly in order to spread wider. Its not like there is any conscious thought involved
here its just that those agents that are totally deadly tend to get buried or burned with their victims, whereas the less deadly
versions spread far and wide due to the mobility of their hosts.
H7 doesn't have a history of causing pandemics (Score:5, Informative)
In 2003 when a bird flu was sweeping through Asia, Maurice Hilleman [wikipedia.org], a 20th century virologist who created more vaccines than all other virologists combined, said it would not turn into a pandemic. He turned out to be right: the pandemic didn't happen. During his career, Hilleman noticed that the flu pandemics have all been been associated with H1, H2 and H3 hemoglutens. The other 14 hemogluten groups, H4 through H17, haven't been associated with pandemics. Hemogluten is a protein that enables the virus to attach to the throat, and the flu virus has 17 different variants, numbered H1, H2, ...H17.
The other thing Hilleman noticed was that each of the flu pandemics has been separated from its former instance by 68 years. H2 caused pandemics in 1889 and 1957. H3 caused pandemics in 1900 and 1968 and H1 caused pandemics in 1918 and 1986. Based on that pattern, Hilleman thought the next flu pandemic would occur in 2025 when most people who were alive during the H2 1957 pandemic have died.
A key difference between the 1957 instance and the 2025 instance is the fact that the US no longer has any company willing to manufacture vaccines here - they're all overseas. Hilleman spotted the 1957 outbreak before anyone else did and bulldozed the design and manufacture of an effective vaccine in a matter of months. He knew the manufacturers personally and was able to coordinate them into gearing up the necessary production. A lot of what he did then would be impossible today given the FDA's increased power.